Course syllabus

Financial Accounting — Syllabus

Financial Accounting Free sample edition

Financial Accounting is a 3-unit, lower-division undergraduate course offered at [Institution] in [Term]. The class meets in person twice a week for about 75 minutes each time: [Meeting days/times].

This syllabus is the governing document for the course. It tells you what the course is, how your grade is built, what happens each week, and the policies you can count on. Weeks are numbered from Week 1 to Week 16; your instructor's course site gives the due date for each item.

Instructor and Contact

Instructor: [Instructor name]
Contact: [Contact info]
Office hours: [Office hours]

Bring something specific to office hours, such as an entry that will not balance, two accounts you cannot tell apart, or an adjustment you are not sure belongs in this month. Reach out early: a question asked in the week it comes up is far easier to answer than one saved for exam week. Debits and credits take a while to feel natural, and almost everyone reverses one at first. That is normal, and it is what the weekly work is for. Check the course announcements at the start of each week.

Course Description

This is the introductory, one-semester financial accounting course. It studies how a business records its economic events and reports them to the people outside it (investors, lenders, suppliers, and regulators) in an income statement, a statement of retained earnings, a balance sheet, and a statement of cash flows prepared under U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). It is taken by future accountants, business majors, and people who run or plan to run a small business, and it has no prerequisite beyond arithmetic.

The course teaches the accountant's way of working. You analyze what happened, record it so the books stay in balance, put it in the right period, and check every total before anyone relies on it. It is not a managerial or cost accounting course: it reports to outsiders, not to managers. It is not a tax course: tax rules appear only where payroll needs them, as the issuing body states them. It is not an auditing course, and it gives no investment advice.

Every week practices one habit. You state an idea in plain words first, then attach the term, then show it in a journal entry or a statement line. Every transaction walks the same order: what happened, which accounts change and in which direction, the debit and the credit, and the effect on the equation and the statements. The reading ends in one plain sentence that says what the entry or the statement shows.

The arc of the course

The course opens with the environment, because every later week works inside its rules. Week 1 asks what financial accounting is for, who uses it, and who sets its rules. The accounting cycle follows in the order an accountant performs it: the accounting equation and transaction analysis (Week 2), the journal, the ledger, and the trial balance (Week 3), the accrual adjustments (Week 4), and the statements and closing entries (Week 5). By the end of Week 5, one month of the running case has gone from its first transaction to closed books.

Merchandising (Week 6) and inventory costing (Week 7) add the second kind of business, the one that buys and resells goods. Week 8 reviews the first half by the one distinction each topic asks for, adds one light piece of new material on internal control, and holds the midterm. Internal control leads straight into the controls over cash and the bank reconciliation (Week 9). The balance sheet is then taken section by section, assets before liabilities before equity: receivables (Week 10), long-lived assets (Week 11), current liabilities and payroll (Week 12), long-term liabilities (Week 13), and stockholders' equity (Week 14). The statement of cash flows and financial statement analysis come last (Week 15), because they draw on every account the course has taught, and the running case is read from its first month to its second year. Week 16 holds the cumulative final.

What you will work with

One running case is studied all term. It is an illustrative, unnamed bicycle repair and sales shop, organized as a corporation by two founders, followed from its first month into its second year. It describes no real business, and the people in it get roles, such as "a founder", "the mechanic", or "a customer", not names. You meet it in Week 1, record its 12 Month 1 transactions in Weeks 2 and 3, adjust and close its first month in Weeks 4 and 5, and return to it as each new account arrives.

Around the running case, the course works with a small set of illustrative records: the shop's six month-end adjustments, a first purchase and sale of bicycles, three cost layers of helmets, a bank reconciliation, an aging schedule of customer accounts, a delivery van, the mechanic's weekly paycheck at the 2026 payroll rates, a bond issue, and the shop's second-year equity section and statement of cash flows. The internal control components and a few rates, rules, and dates come from the bodies that issue them. Everything that is not a sourced fact is labelled illustrative wherever it appears. Examples also come from food trucks, landscaping companies, campus bookstores, tutoring businesses, coffee roasters, banks, lenders, and shareholders, so no week rests on one business alone.

Our approach: balance, sources, and evenhandedness

Four commitments run through every week.

Every entry balances, and every total is shown. Every journal entry has equal debits and credits, and every subtotal and total is written as the sum of the figures above it, so you can foot it yourself. An example that does not balance is a defect, never a shortcut, and you hold your own work to the same rule.
Rules and rates come from their source. A standard, a tax rate, or a legal rule is stated as its issuing body states it, with the body and the year. Tax and payroll rates appear only as the course pins them, the 2026 rates as the Social Security Administration and IRS Publication 15 (2026) state them, and the course presents no rule as its own invention.
Methods are compared by their effects, never ranked. Where GAAP allows more than one method, such as FIFO, LIFO, or weighted average for inventory, or straight-line, units-of-production, or double-declining-balance for depreciation, the course computes each method and says what it does to the reported figures. It never says which method is better. GAAP and IFRS are compared the same way, without a verdict. Documented rules, such as GAAP's requirement of accrual-basis statements and the fact that IFRS does not allow LIFO, are stated plainly and are not staged as debates.
No tax, legal, or investment advice. The course teaches how transactions are recorded and reported; it never tells you how to file a tax return, how to set up a business, or whether to buy a company's shares. The federal income tax withheld from the mechanic's paycheck is illustrative and is never computed from the IRS tables. A real public company's annual report appears only in Week 15, read for the structure of its statements, and no real company's figure is ever keyed.

No grade depends on which method you prefer. Your grade depends on balanced, correctly classified entries, totals that foot, statements that tie to one another, an accurate reading of what a choice does to the figures, and claims about standards and rates that you have checked against their source.

Rules from their source

Each rule below is the issuing body's, named with the body and the year, and taught in the week shown.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), established in 1973, is an independent, private-sector, not-for-profit standard setter. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), created by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, holds legal authority over public-company reporting and recognizes the FASB as its designated standard setter. The AICPA Code of Professional Conduct sets out six principles. (Week 1)
Luca Pacioli's Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita, printed in Venice in 1494, contains the first published description of double-entry bookkeeping. Pacioli described the method; he did not invent it. (Week 3)
The FASB's Accounting Standards Update No. 2014-09 (May 2014) sets out the five steps of revenue recognition, which the course quotes in the standard's own words. (Week 4)
IFRS does not allow LIFO, as the SEC stated in 2008, while U.S. GAAP permits it. (Week 7)
The five components of internal control are the control environment, risk assessment, control activities, information and communication, and monitoring, as the Government Accountability Office's Green Book sets them out in adapting COSO's Internal Control—Integrated Framework, issued in 1992. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 requires the management of public companies to report on internal control over financial reporting. (Week 8)
The Department of Labor states the Fair Labor Standards Act's overtime rule this way: "Unless exempt, employees covered by the Act must receive overtime pay for hours worked over 40 in a workweek at a rate not less than time and one-half their regular rates of pay." (Week 12)
For wages paid in 2026, Social Security tax is 6.2 percent each for the employee and the employer, on wages up to the $184,500 wage base, and Medicare tax is 1.45 percent each, with no wage base, as the Social Security Administration and IRS Publication 15 (2026) state them. (Week 12)
Most U.S. public companies file a Form 10‑K with the SEC each year, and every filed 10‑K is public on the SEC's EDGAR website. (Week 15)

Required Materials

You buy no textbook and pay nothing for course materials. Every reading and video is a link to an external resource, opened from the week's page so you always reach the version the course teaches from. Beyond a web browser, you need these free tools:

A free spreadsheet: Google Sheets or any free spreadsheet, for journals, T-accounts, trial balances, schedules, and statements. Every total is computed by formula rather than typed in, and every entry is checked so that debits equal credits. Each Accounting Workshop spells out its steps and also gives a route that works the totals by hand on paper, for equal credit.
Free issuing-body sources: the rules, rates, and dates the course uses come from the issuing body's own pages, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and its Investor.gov site, the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Labor, and the Government Accountability Office. In Week 15 you also use the SEC's free EDGAR search to open a public company's annual report. None costs anything.
A free account with one approved AI chatbot, from the list in the AI-Use Policy below. A free tier is enough for everything in this course, and every AI-based activity also has a route that needs no AI at all.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course you will be able to:

Outcome A. Recording and reporting: analyze a set of transactions, record them with balanced entries in the correct accounts and periods, and prepare the financial statements that follow from them, stating what each statement shows in one plain sentence.
Outcome B. Verification and judgment: check every entry, total, and statement for balance and accuracy, explain how an accounting choice changes the reported figures, and verify any claim about a standard, a tax rate, or a company's figures, including AI output, against an issuing-body source.

The nine course objectives below build toward those two outcomes. Each week's overview page names the objective that week serves and turns it into a short checklist of what you should be able to do by the end of the week.

Explain the purpose of financial accounting, its users, the forms of business organization, the roles of GAAP, the FASB, the SEC, and IFRS, and the ethical principles that guide accountants.
Analyze business transactions with the accounting equation and record them in a journal using double-entry bookkeeping, post them to the ledger, and prepare a trial balance.
Apply accrual accounting: recognize revenue and expenses in the right period, prepare adjusting entries for deferrals and accruals, and prepare an adjusted trial balance.
Complete the accounting cycle: prepare an income statement, a statement of retained earnings, and a classified balance sheet, journalize closing entries, and prepare a post-closing trial balance.
Account for merchandising operations and inventory: record purchases and sales in a perpetual system, compute cost of goods sold and gross profit, and apply FIFO, LIFO, and weighted-average costing and the lower of cost and net realizable value.
Describe internal control and its components, and account for cash, including the bank reconciliation, and for receivables, including the allowance method and notes receivable.
Account for long-lived assets, including cost, depreciation by three methods, and disposal, and for current liabilities, including payroll.
Account for long-term liabilities, including bonds issued at face, at a discount, and at a premium, and for stockholders' equity, including stock issuance, dividends, and treasury stock.
Prepare a statement of cash flows by the indirect method, compute and interpret basic financial ratios, and read a public company's annual report.

How this course works

Every module presents the same content in three ways — a chapter to read, a slide deck with speaker notes, and captioned videos — so you can choose how to take it in. Each module's lecture page also carries the week's explanation as one spoken-style walk-through.

A typical week runs in this order:

Week overview. Open the module's overview page, titled "Week N Overview" (for example, Week 1 Overview). It lists the week's work in order with time estimates and names the week's checkpoint, the one thing you should be able to do by the end of the week.
Chapter (about 30 to 55 minutes; each chapter prints its own time). The week's primary reading, where each idea moves from plain words to the term to a journal entry or a statement line. Read it first.
Lecture page and slide deck (about 15 to 20 minutes for the lecture, plus time with the deck). The same ideas, explained aloud and in slides.
Readings and videos. An optional go-deeper menu; every video has captions.
Lecture tutorial (60 to 90 minutes). A one-on-one session with your chatbot that teaches, gives practice, and ends with a completion summary you submit.
Practice set (15 to 25 minutes). Ungraded practice with a Socratic coach that asks questions, offers hints, and gives you a short self-check rubric for each problem, at your own pace and on fresh one-off businesses.
Accounting Workshop (about 90 minutes). One small set of books worked end to end. You record the week's transactions in a free spreadsheet, check that every entry balances, prepare the week's statement or schedule and foot it, and say in one plain sentence what it shows and how a different allowed choice would change it. Next, you ask your chatbot to record the same transactions, check every entry, every total, and every claim it makes about a standard or a rate against the pinned source, and catch and correct one of its slips by hand. You finish with a short reflection on where your own first instinct about an account was wrong.
Discussion (about 45 minutes) and assignment (about 60 to 90 minutes). Where you put the week's ideas to work on an arguable, applied question and on problems of your own.
Quiz. A short auto-graded check of what you now know, taken on your own.

Week 8 is lighter: the chapter (about 30 to 40 minutes), the lecture, slides, readings, practice set, and discussion, then the study guide, exam-prep tutorial, practice exam, and midterm. Week 16 has no new module; it holds the final exam and its study guide, exam-prep tutorial, and practice exam.

Grading

Your course grade is the weighted average of the six groups below. The weights sum to 100%.

Grading weight by assessment group
Component	Weight
Tutorials & Practice	10%
Quizzes	10%
Workshops	20%
Assignments	25%
Discussions	15%
Exams	20%
Total	100%

What each group holds

Tutorials & Practice: the 14 weekly lecture tutorials, one in every module except Week 8. The practice sets sit beside them and are ungraded.
Quizzes: 14 weekly quizzes, one in every module except Week 8. Quizzes are closed to AI.
Workshops: the 14 weekly Accounting Workshops, one in every module except Week 8. Each Workshop publishes its rubric with it. The rubric rewards balanced, correctly classified entries, footed totals, a correct statement or schedule, the plain-sentence reading, and the chatbot slip you catch and correct.
Assignments: 14 weekly assignments, one in every module except Week 8. Each assignment publishes its rubric with the assignment.
Discussions: 15 weekly discussions, one in every module from Week 1 to Week 15.
Exams: the midterm in Week 8 and the cumulative final in Week 16. Within this group, the final carries twice the midterm's weight.

Each week's discussion, and each week's assignment outside Week 8, ships in two versions. The adaptive version is published and graded by default. A traditional version that uses no AI is also in the module, unpublished; your instructor may publish it instead. An unpublished version does not appear to you and does not count. A published traditional version takes the adaptive one's place in the same group and counts the same.

Letter grades follow the standard scheme:

Letter grade by final course percentage
Letter	Percentage range
A	90–100
B	80–89
C	70–79
D	60–69
F	below 60

Weekly Schedule

The course runs for sixteen weeks: fifteen weeks of modules and a finals week. Every module from Week 1 to Week 15 holds the same materials: the week overview, the chapter, the lecture page (titled "Lecture:" followed by the module's title), the slide deck, the readings and videos page, and the practice set. Every module also ships both an adaptive discussion and a traditional no-AI alternative, and every module except Week 8 ships both an adaptive assignment and a traditional no-AI alternative. The adaptive versions are scheduled, graded, and published; the traditional alternatives are unpublished by default and count only if your instructor publishes them instead.

Module title, published graded work, and unpublished traditional alternatives by week
Week	Module	Graded and published	Traditional alternative (unpublished)
1	Accounting and the Business Environment	Tutorial, Accounting Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
2	The Accounting Equation and Transaction Analysis	Tutorial, Accounting Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
3	Recording Transactions: Debits, Credits, and the Trial Balance	Tutorial, Accounting Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
4	Accrual Accounting and Adjusting Entries	Tutorial, Accounting Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
5	Completing the Accounting Cycle	Tutorial, Accounting Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
6	Merchandising Operations	Tutorial, Accounting Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
7	Inventory Costing	Tutorial, Accounting Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
8	Midterm Review & Exam	Adaptive discussion, midterm exam	Discussion
9	Cash and the Bank Reconciliation	Tutorial, Accounting Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
10	Receivables	Tutorial, Accounting Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
11	Long-Lived Assets	Tutorial, Accounting Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
12	Current Liabilities and Payroll	Tutorial, Accounting Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
13	Long-Term Liabilities	Tutorial, Accounting Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
14	Stockholders' Equity	Tutorial, Accounting Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
15	The Statement of Cash Flows, Analysis, and the Course Synthesis	Tutorial, Accounting Workshop, adaptive discussion, adaptive assignment, quiz	Discussion, assignment
16	Finals week (no module)	Final exam	None

What each week asks of you

Week 1. Workshop: Reading a Plant Nursery's Opening Plan. Discussion: Who Needs the Numbers, and Who Writes the Rules? Assignment: Reading the Bicycle Shop's Plan: Form, Entity, and Users.
Week 2. Workshop: The Shop's First Month in One Equation. Discussion: Equity, Cash, and the Owners' Claim. Assignment: Twelve Transactions, One Equation: The Shop's First Month.
Week 3. Workshop: Journal, Ledger, and Trial Balance for the Shop's First Month. Discussion: Is a Balanced Trial Balance Enough? Assignment: From Journal to Trial Balance: Recording the Shop's Month 1.
Week 4. Workshop: Adjusting the Bicycle Shop's Books. Discussion: Earned, Estimated, or Collected? Assignment: Month-End at the Bicycle Shop: Six Adjustments, One Balance.
Week 5. Workshop: Closing the Bicycle Shop's Books. Discussion: Earned, Kept, or in the Bank? Assignment: Closing Month 1: Three Statements and Four Closing Entries.
Week 6. Workshop: The Bicycle Sale, Entry by Entry. Discussion: What Does Gross Profit Tell You? Assignment: The Bicycle Sale: From Invoice to Gross Profit.
Week 7. Workshop: Costing the Helmets Three Ways. Discussion: Which Story Should the Helmets Tell? Assignment: Costing the Helmets Three Ways.
Week 8. Discussion: Can a Lender Trust These Books? Then the midterm, taken on your own.
Week 9. Workshop: Reconciling the Bicycle Shop's Cash. Discussion: Who Guards the Cash? Assignment: One True Balance: Reconciling the Bicycle Shop's Cash.
Week 10. Workshop: What the Bicycle Shop Will Really Collect. Discussion: How Much Will Really Arrive? Assignment: What the Customers Owe: Estimating, Writing Off, and Earning Interest.
Week 11. Workshop: One Van, Two Schedules, One Sale. Discussion: Same Van, Different Stories. Assignment: One Van, Five Years: Cost, Depreciation, and a Sale.
Week 12. Workshop: The Mechanic's Payroll Register. Discussion: What Does a Worker Really Cost? Assignment: Gross to Net: The Mechanic's Paycheck and What the Shop Owes.
Week 13. Workshop: The Bicycle Shop's Bonds, Period by Period. Discussion: What Does Borrowing Really Cost? Assignment: What the Bonds Really Cost: Discounts, Premiums, and Carrying Value.
Week 14. Workshop: The Bicycle Shop's Year 2 Equity, Line by Line. Discussion: Paid In, Earned, or Handed Back? Assignment: Paid In, Handed Back, Bought Back: The Shop's Year 2 Equity.
Week 15. Workshop: The Bicycle Shop's Year 2 Cash, Section by Section. Discussion: Profit, Cash, or the Story Between? Assignment: Where the Cash Went: The Shop's Year 2 Cash Flows and Ratios.

The midterm and the final

The midterm in Week 8 covers Objectives 1 to 5 as taught in Weeks 1 to 7. Week 8 itself reviews those weeks by the one distinction each topic asks for: asset against expense, liability against expense, debit against credit, cash basis against accrual basis, deferral against accrual, revenue against cash received, temporary against permanent account, perpetual against periodic, and FIFO against LIFO. Its one piece of new material, internal control (its five components, COSO's framework, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and the limits of what any control can promise), is worked in that week's chapter, practice set, and discussion, and returns in Week 9.

The final in Week 16 is cumulative and draws on all nine course objectives. It gives the most weight to the second half of the course, Objectives 6 to 9 (internal control, cash, and receivables; long-lived assets and current liabilities with payroll; long-term liabilities and stockholders' equity; and the statement of cash flows, the ratios, and the annual report), while still drawing on every first-half objective, Objectives 1 to 5. Both exams come with a study guide, a practice exam, and an exam-prep tutorial you work with your chatbot. Both are auto-graded, so every item is multiple choice, multiple answer, matching, or true/false, with no free numeric entry and no essay, and any table an item uses is small and described in words.

Attendance and Participation

This course meets in person twice a week. Come to class having opened the week's overview page and read the chapter, because class time builds on that reading with entries, statements, and comparisons. Your participation also shows in your weekly work: the tutorial, the Accounting Workshop, the discussion, the assignment, and the quiz. Each week builds on the ones before it (you cannot adjust a trial balance until you can post a journal entry), so falling a week behind is the most common reason a grade slips. Keep to the weekly rhythm, and talk to your instructor the moment a week stalls. If you must miss class, follow the week's module from its overview page so you stay on pace.

Late Work

Late work loses 10% of the item's credit for each day it is late. If something serious comes up, such as an illness or a family emergency, contact your instructor before the due date whenever you can so the two of you can agree on a fair plan. The penalty exists to keep the course moving, not to punish genuine hardship.

Academic Integrity

The work you submit must be your own, and you are bound by your institution's academic integrity standard. Do not copy another student's work, do not submit work you did not do, and do not misrepresent how a piece of work was produced. In a course built on records that others rely on, integrity also means honest books: every entry you submit is the one you made, every total is the one your figures produce, every claim about a standard, a rule, or a rate traces to the issuing body you can name, and the running case and every course dataset are always treated as illustrative. Three violations matter most in this course: inventing a standard, a rule, a rate, a statistic, or a quotation, or crediting one to a real issuing body, including one a chatbot supplied; fabricating or doctoring a chatbot conversation or its share link; and using AI on the quizzes, the midterm, or the final. Violations are handled under your institution's academic integrity process and may result in no credit for the item.

Real businesses and real figures

No graded work asks you to use a real business's books. Every Accounting Workshop, assignment, and practice set supplies its own illustrative data, and the default material all term is the running case. If you work for a business or keep its books, never submit or paste its records, its customers' details, or anyone's pay information into course work or into a chatbot. In Week 15 you open a public company's annual report on EDGAR and read it for the structure of its statements; you do not analyze it as an investment, and the course keys none of its figures.

Accessibility and Disability

This course is designed to reflect universal-design principles and offers multiple means of representation, engagement, and expression. If you have a disability and need an accommodation, contact your institution's disability services office to arrange it, and let your instructor know so it can be put in place promptly. If any material is hard to use with your assistive technology, tell your instructor and an equivalent version will be provided. Every table, journal entry, statement, and schedule in the course, including any that a quiz or exam item refers to, is described in words as well as shown. This course is not yet accessibility-certified, and your feedback helps improve it. The course page Accessibility & Inclusion in Module 0 explains how the course offers multiple modes, how to turn on captions, and how to request an accommodation.

AI-Use Policy

This course uses an AI chatbot as a sparring partner, and then asks you to check its work and correct it by hand. Use any one of the approved chatbots: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, or Microsoft Copilot. Your instructor may edit this list. Free tiers are fine, and Copilot is often included with a campus Microsoft 365 account.

AI may be used on these activities:

Lecture tutorials (completed with a chatbot). Each week you work the tutorial in a conversation with an approved chatbot, then submit the conversation share link and your completion summary.
Practice sets (ungraded). You work the practice exercises with a chatbot coach that asks questions and offers hints.
Adaptive discussions (completed with a chatbot). You hold a real-time dialogue with an approved chatbot, then post the AI's summary with the conversation share link. This version does not require replies to classmates.
Adaptive assignments (AI-coached). You do your own work first, then work it through with a chatbot coach that scores it against the assignment's scoring criteria, and submit the self-scored report, your revised work, and the conversation share link. You remain the author: the coach asks questions and checks your reasoning; it does not do the work for you.
Accounting Workshops (a pair-consult step and a required AI-critique step). After your own record, you ask your chatbot to record the same transactions, and you check every entry, every total, and every claim it makes about a standard or a rate against the pinned source before trusting any of it. Then you catch and correct one of its slips by hand, such as a debit and a credit reversed; an entry that does not balance; revenue recorded when cash arrives instead of when it is earned; an expense in the wrong period; a total that is wrong; a standard or a rule that does not exist; an outdated tax rate or wage base; a claim that IFRS allows LIFO; net income treated as cash or depreciation as a market value; or an item placed on the wrong side or in the wrong section.
Exam-prep tutorials and studying. Use AI freely to review, to check your understanding, and to prepare for the exams.

AI may not be used on the quizzes, the midterm, and the final. These are closed to AI and must be entirely your own work, because they confirm that you personally can analyze a transaction, choose the accounts and the debit and credit, compute an adjustment, a cost of goods sold, or a depreciation amount, and read a financial statement.

A chatbot is not a source. It can explain a term or quiz you on a distinction, but it often sounds most confident where it is least reliable. It may reverse a debit and a credit, add a column wrong, put revenue in the month the cash arrived, quote a tax rate or a wage base from an earlier year, or cite a standard that does not exist. Every entry it writes you check for balance, every total you recompute in your spreadsheet, and every claim it makes about a standard or a rate you check against the pinned or issuing-body source before you use it.

If your instructor publishes a traditional alternative. A traditional discussion is your own post and your own replies to classmates; a traditional assignment is your own submitted work, graded by your instructor. AI may help you think, but you write and submit the work yourself.

Disclosure. The share link documents your AI use on the AI-based activities, so they need no separate note. For any other graded work where AI help is allowed, add one line naming the tool and how you used it.

BYO-AI Access: equity, cost, and privacy

Equity and a non-AI route. You never have to create an account with a chatbot company to complete this course or to reach any grade in it. Every AI-based activity in this course carries an Equivalent route (no AI required) on its own page. It assesses the same objectives, for the same credit, against the same rubric. Take it whenever you like, for any reason or none; you do not have to ask permission, explain, or arrange it in advance.
Cost. A free tier of any approved chatbot covers everything in this course. No graded work depends on a paid subscription.
Privacy. Before you start, read what your chosen chatbot keeps of your conversations and how it uses them. Never paste personal information you would not want stored, and never paste a real person's pay, tax, or bank details or a real business's records: the course's illustrative data is all a chatbot needs to see. Remember that a share link lets anyone who has it read that conversation.

Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com